My Time as a Museum Educator at the MCHC: Key Takeaways

 

            My time at the Maryland Center for History and Culture was a wonderful experience overall. I met amazing people, and my supervisors taught me so much about the field of museum education. I worked on lesson plans, gave tours, and assisted other museum educators with research, all of which was very enjoyable. My key takeaways from the experience are that education is an ever-evolving field which requires constant rewriting and learning, and that it is impossible to completely overhaul a decades old lesson plan in only a few months.

            My main project was to rewrite and edit the Colonial Maryland Traveling Trunk, which, unfortunately, I was only able to partially complete because of how much time I spent giving tours. I was able to write a document that outlines all the changes that need to be made and all the sources required to make it happen, which my supervisor said was more than enough in the time I was given. This project proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be, as there is a lot that goes into lesson planning that I did not expect. I had to familiarize myself with state standards and curriculum, while also trying to implement what I learned about intersectional history from my own studies. It took patience and a lot of collaboration to learn how to discuss difficult histories about colonization with children, and I appreciate everything I learned from that experience. I also learned a lot from giving colonial Maryland tours to school groups, specifically how challenging it is to discuss such complex economic and social histories to elementary age children. I would talk to children about Indigenous People fighting for their land or the development of the slave economy, and they were always very curious and asked deeply thoughtful and insightful questions that I did not always know the answer to, which ultimately was a good thing because it started conversations between the kids and myself. 

            The only thing about the internship that disappointed me was that I was not able to complete the project to the extent that I was hoping because I also gave tours. I loved doing that tours, but it often distracted me from the project and took up more time, which meant I was not able to focus as much as I wanted to. However, I would not have given up doing the tours because I found those experiences to be even more enjoyable than my time working on the project. Overall, I look back at this internship fondly, and I genuinely feel like I could go back and work in this field, or even at the MCHC. I am definitely going to stay in touch with the people I worked with whether or not I go back to the MCHC, and I know I will use what I learned there in whatever my future career turns out to be, whether it is museum work or not.